This shared dream, p.1
This Shared Dream, page 1
For Joseph, with love:
these years are not enough.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THOMAS E. GOONAN, my father, generously contributed a small portion of his self-written and edited memoirs to In War Times. In This Shared Dream, Sam Dance’s “notebook entry” about the Squounch Club is my father’s work, as are other “notebook entries” herein. Thank you, Dad, for all the music, and for your enormous contribution to my life in literature. You and Mom made books my world from the very beginning.
The Serendipity Book Store at Pickett Shopping Center in Fairfax, Virginia, was opened, operated, and owned by Steve and Danni Aloi, a wonderful community-oriented couple, in the late 1960s. It was a popular, wide-ranging bookstore filled with anything you could possibly want, or we would order it immediately. I met the Alois around 1966, and worked in the main store and at all the branches until that dream ended when the original store was destroyed in a tornado on April 1, 1973. The other branches did not remain open for much longer after that.
Many thanks to Steve Aloi, and to the memory of Danni.
Salutations, as well, to those with whom I worked there. You know who you are.
The only remaining book vestige of the Serendipity Crew, that I know of, is Mike Nally’s Hole in the Wall Books in Falls Church, Virginia.
Diane “Danni” Aloi passed away on July 4, 2003.
The Serendipity Book Store in this novel is nostalgically named after the original.
The original Halcyon House, after which I have named the Dances’ house, was the name of my friend Marilyn Bott’s family home on Staten Island.
Thanks to Ann Wobil for her help with the African chapters, and for countless other, more important acts of dedication and kindness. Thanks to Sage Walker and Steve Brown for reading countless early iterations. And finally, many thanks to David Hartwell and Stacy Hague-Hill for seeing this novel through all its changes.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Timestream One
Timestream Two
Timestream One
Timestream Two
Grace Note
Also by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Copyright
Eliani Hadntz
TIMESTREAM ONE
July 1890, North of St. Petersburg, Russia
YEARS AFTERWARD, Eliani realized that the meadow and the small country dacha belonged to her St. Petersburg grandmother.
The dacha was directly on the shore of a clear, cold lake. On this summer morning, Eliani, five years old, in her second-story bedroom, struggled to button her dress. She was eager to join her mother, Rosa, who was framed by the dormer window and limned by sunlight as she stood below on the weathered dock.
Hands on her hips, Rosa gazed outward, her cotton skirt fluttering in the slight breeze. She turned, saw Eliani, and waved. “Come down!”
As Eliani grew, so did her awareness of her mother’s uniqueness. Rosa Hadntz was a medical doctor in an age when very few women were, and was therefore, quite naturally, a feminist. She was also a poet, and a pacifist.
But now, Rosa Hadntz was just her mother, out by the lake.
Eliani gave up on the rest of her buttons. She ran down the stairs, through the house, ignoring the maid’s shouted Slow down! and pounded onto the dock.
“Be careful of that rotten board,” her mother said. She looked back at the house and sighed. “The old house used to be so beautiful. Not so … shabby. When I was a little girl, visiting my cousins, it was paradise. White crystal and linen and laughter.”
Eliani, used to the looming streets of Vienna, breathed the spice of fir trees and the scent of fresh, clean water. Beyond the meadow, where blue cornflowers swept through tall grass, lay a mysterious, sun-dappled forest, riven by the arrow-straight road that they followed from train station to carriage house in her grandmother’s tarantass, pulled by four black horses.
She saw nothing but vast, open, intense paradise. Below, golden, wave-scalloped sand shimmered through water clear as glass. “Can we swim?”
Rosa smiled down at Eliani, her eyes shadowed by wings of loose, shining black hair. “It’s cold,” she warned. “And you don’t know how. It’s easy, though.”
To Eliani’s surprise, her mother began unbuttoning the long row of buttons on her dress. She shrugged it off, along with the complicated cotton undergarment she wore, stooping, finally, to unlace her low black boots and kick them off. Then she stood on the dock, naked.
Eliani was astonished. Her mother’s quintessential space was a dressing room, draped with clothing, which she donned with care and precision. Eliani had, once or twice, glimpsed her mother naked—but never like this! Never boldly, out in the sunlight, framed by forest and green hills.
“Well?” Rosa threw back her head and laughed, not just to her daughter, but also to the lake, the forest, the intense, blue sky. She dashed to the end of the dock, dove in, and surfaced, shrieking and breathless. “Come on, then!”
Eliani undid her just-fastened buttons quickly. The air and the sunlight felt good on her bare skin. She stood on the edge of the dock, hesitated, then jumped. She plummeted down, shocked by the cold, then saw, through the water, her mother’s pale, blurred body move toward her. Her mother caught and boosted her to the surface. “Move your arms,” Rosa said calmly as Eliani spluttered and coughed and felt a peculiar tang in her nose. “Kick your legs. That’s swimming. Good. I’m right here.”
Eliani no longer felt the cold, only the cool, unfettered liquid, a new, silken atmosphere. The sun, in contrast, was hot on her back. It was delicious. Her mother’s deft hands turned her over so that she squinted at the brilliance and glimpsed a ring of pointed firs surrounding the circle of blue sky. “Take a deep breath. The air in your lungs is lighter than water. Relax. You’ll float.”
Her father’s violin music suddenly pierced the air, and seemed a part of the forest, the lake, and the house, where he practiced every morning in the parlor.
Eliani looked up at the blue summer sky, cloudless and intense. She took a deep breath, and floated.
Timestream Two
1991
Jill
THE CRACK-UP
March 21, Washington, D.C.
THE WORST THING was that Jill Dance couldn’t talk about what had happened when she was seventeen. Not with anyone.
Their mother had vanished, history had flipped to a new path, her brother and sister had no memory of the years Jill had stolen from them, and the tragedy was entirely her fault. She had been reckless and impulsive, like any teenager, but the consequences had been so shattering that words, explanations, and many memories had been swept from her and her family with the force of a hurricane scouring away homes, historical artifacts, even entire lives. Hurricane Jill.
She had kept it inside until she was forty-one, a doctoral student in political science at Georgetown.
The tall, wavy-glassed windows in the old classroom stood open. A cool, page-riffling breeze, the distant cries of children, and the first sunlight in weeks encouraged students to think of little else. Certainly, no one but Jill was paying attention to their professor, a Soviet expat.
A slow and measured speaker, Koslov framed his English precisely. His pause after “In this case…” seemed to last forever.
Jill said, “I disagree.”
“On what grounds?” Koslov responded, his normally placid expression roused to interest. One of the undergrads sighed loud. Koslov, a seasoned debater in his seventies, was Jill’s doctoral adviser, and they often got into long, obscure disagreements.
Jill stood, and leaned forward. Her palms pressed against the desk. “After the Soviets took Berlin—”
“Would you mind repeating that?” Koslov’s eyes narrowed. He pushed his shaggy gray hair from his forehead and waited, hands on his stocky hips.
“I…” She paused. Everyone was looking at her with great interest.
Wait a minute. The Soviets had not taken Berlin. The Allies had not handed East Germany to Stalin on a silver platter. Instead, Patton, ignoring orders, forged through Germany and took Berlin before the Soviets could get there, which dramatically changed postwar politics and territories.
She said, “I mean, after Patton argued with Eisenhower about taking Berlin and finally obeyed Eisenhower’s orders—” That was right, wasn’t it? Yes. That was what had happened, here … or was it there, before?
Damn.
She stopped speaking. Somewhere, a bell rang.
Relieved, she stuffed her Q, an all-purpose computer and communicator, into her pack and hurried toward the door, tired and wondering what the hell had gotten into her. It was the last class of her last day at Georgetown—a makeup class, actually, to satisfy her doctoral requirements, one that she would have ordinarily taken when working on her master’s degree. She worked part-time at the World Bank, and the full-time job she had taken a hiatus from awaited her, with near-doubled PhD salary. She also worked part-time in her bookstore, Serendipity, and took care of her five-year-old son, Stevie. She didn’t have time for this, or much of anything else either.
Koslov boxed her in by the door as the other students rushed out behind him. “Jill?”
“I have to get to an appointment.” She tried to get past him. He stepped sideways, blocking her exit.
“Please.” Lev Koslov, tie askew, as usual, and his brown suit rumpled, moved in a perpetual haze of acrid cigarette smoke. He favored a Russian brand with a wolf on the pack
However, she did not want to discuss her lapse.
He fished his classbook from his jacket pocket. “This is not the first time that you have mentioned such … ideas.” The book-sized screen lit with print when he touched it. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Jill. “Last week’s test.”
“I already checked my grade.”
“Yes, I gave you an A. As usual. It was the extra-credit question, which you did not need for the grade, as it turned out. I didn’t take off for your answer.”
She read, “‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy…’ Oh.” She gave the reader back to him. Kennedy had not been assassinated. Not here. He was an international statesman, a celebrity, the father of the space program, as well as the father of several children born to women not married to him. “I’m sorry. I think…” She tried to imagine how to gloss over her idiotic outburst, and failed. Either she could say she was going crazy, which she didn’t think would cut much slack with Dr. Koslov, or …
“I’m writing an alternate history,” she said.
“A what?”
“An alternate history. I used to write comic books when I was in high school, and…” Damn. Worse and worse. She still had to defend her dissertation before this man. “Well, I must have been thinking about it when I wrote this.” She smiled briefly, and, she hoped, disarmingly.
“Mmm.” Koslov’s long look, from deep-set pale blue eyes beneath tangled gray eyebrows, was one of keen appraisal. “And in this alternate history, what happened after Kennedy died? I seem to remember that Franklin Roosevelt died too, in his fourth term, before the war was over, instead of completing two years of his fifth term and negotiating the settlement with the Soviet Union that made them relinquish Poland, Hungary, and Romania. What did that difference lead to, in your alternate history? I’m just asking in theoretical terms.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to leave.” Angry to hear herself apologize for the third time in five minutes, she pushed past him into the now-empty hall and hurried down the stairs.
* * *
Jill unlocked her bike, adjusted her helmet, and coasted off campus, disturbed and distracted. Lost in thought, she turned left onto M Street from Wisconsin Avenue instead of right, as she had intended. She passed a rare diesel-powered Metrobus and coughed in the cloud of exhaust. Mostly, the streets swarmed with tiny electric cars, and the new fleet of smaller electric and alternate-fuel Metrobusses. As charging kiosks became more plentiful, it was easy to use a prepurchased pass or a credit card to pick up a car, bike, or scooter, and drop it off at another kiosk, but Jill preferred her own custom-built bike.
But riding through the city was sometimes unpleasant, especially when she was tired. Stress removed some filter, so that the landscape of the city appeared as it was before, when the city, and time, and everyone’s history, was, sometimes subtly, and sometimes starkly, other. She saw the old streets, before a particular overpass was built, before a block was razed for offices. She saw houses, for seconds at a time, which were no longer there. Of course, everyone did, to a certain extent; cities were in constant flux.
Except that Jill saw some houses, she was sure, that never had been here, in this history. Instead, she saw a District of Columbia that was different than the one she lived in now. Different in its past, and therefore changed in those textural details, great and small, that belonged to her previous historical reality.
She saw houses of people who no longer seemed to exist, whom she could never find, even with Q. For instance, she sometimes saw the house of Bridget Donnally, she of the long nose, pale face, and superior attitude who regularly made pronouncements such as, “Dance, if you don’t do your best, you won’t get anywhere.”
Bridget’s house, which Jill had often visited, was in a neighborhood that had never existed in this world. For a year or two, Jill had done a lot of research, trying to reconcile the discrepancies, but there was no evolution of land use from residential to commercial. There was only stark difference. The old plat in City Hall showed the Donnally home site as the location of a small hotel for the past hundred and fifty years, in a commercial area presently quasi-bohemian. In Jill’s childhood, the same corner held a welcoming old-fashioned single-family house surrounded by oaks and spilling over with Bridget’s siblings, also nonexistent in this world, on a block of houses built to order, in a time when that was the norm.
Bridget had always called Jill by her last name. Even in sixth grade, Jill found this odd, coming from another sixth-grader. Jill had been surprised and somewhat gratified to see normally dauntless Bridget immobilized down in the creek bed one day when they were gathering sand to enhance their cardboard Egyptian school project because she suddenly noticed the snake Jill had leapt over without even thinking about it.
“It’s just a rat snake. It won’t hurt you.” Jill grasped it behind its head to show Bridget, but Bridget trembled, all color drained from her face, and insisted that Jill lead her back upstream and uphill to the safe, snakeless sidewalk. This chink in Bridget’s intellectual detachment was Jill’s first deep awareness of the difference between persona and hidden emotional triggers.
Bridget was real as real could be. But there was no trace of her or her six siblings on any records Jill found. No one by the name of Donnally had ever attended Jill’s school.
So, the hard question she asked herself constantly, was: Did I kill them all? Did they never exist?
Did the potential nuclear holocaust that hung over the world back then actually happen? Did Vietnam worsen and consume the United States, as it did in my alternate past? Or are they all happily living, somewhen, each with their own six children, in that world in which Kennedy actually did die in Dallas in 1963, twenty years ago?
The mere fact of Kennedy’s living had unfurled a new history. The history she lived in shared many aspects with the one she remembered. But not all. It was keeping the details in place, some to one history, and some to another that was so damned hard.
She cut down a cool, leafy avenue, reflecting that she’d been a fool to go into political science, given this very large problem. But then, history had become like a puzzle to her, one without a solution, only different resolutions, or a kaleidoscope. If you moved one piece, turned the tube one click, the whole picture might change. She wanted to think she was studying the pivots of history, the real world-changers, but she had discovered that every major historian had her own opinion of what such pivots might be.
Jill remembered, as clearly as if looking down one of those lost streets, that Sam Dance, her father, had marveled at the swift miniaturization of computer components, the internationalization of communications satellites and the like, once Kennedy and Khrushchev achieved their historical 1965 alliance. The great scientific and technological minds of the entire world were free to work together, and they had enabled the sudden emergence of Q in 1983.
She knew that, along with her, Sam could look down the other road of the sixties that they had also lived through, the one with massive Soviet crackdowns, the American assassinations, the Vietnam War, with its ten million Asian and sixty thousand American casualties, and attendant, deadly international student riots.
She also knew that no one else in the milieu in which she lived now—she had taken to calling it a timestream, which elicited the sensation of precarious fluidity that sometimes overwhelmed her—could do that. If they existed, she had not heard from them. She was enveloped by a world that seemed more peaceful, more cooperative, more focused on communication and education, and less focused on aggression. She hoped this was just the beginning of a huge change in human history, which was almost entirely a history of wars.
But her father had vanished. Perhaps, when Sam had disappeared, five years earlier, he had just taken another road, one newly opened. Perhaps he had found an avenue to Bette, Jill’s mother, who had vanished in November 1963. She too went on a trip, as far as Jill’s brother and sister knew, and never returned. Kind of like going to the corner store for cigarettes, leaving your family to gradually realize that you might be gone for good. But perhaps Bette Dance, née Elegante, had not had much choice.
